HTC: Licensing Deal With Apple Will Make Our Products Better

HTC China president Ray Yam believes the Taiwanese company’s new licensing deal with Apple will allow it to “take broader steps” and create better products this year. The Droid DNA maker recently entered into a 10-year licensing agreement with Apple that covers all current, pending, and future patents, and ended the litigation ongoing between the two companies.

“The settlement with Apple will start to pay off next year, and the fourth quarter of this year is still going at a set pace,” Yam told the Economic Observer of China during an interview. “The biggest benefit to us is that we can put more energy into innovation, which is more important than anything else for a technology company.”

HTC has been wasting too much of its resources on fighting Apple recently, Yam acknowledged, but it can now put a stop to that and encourage its staff to “take broader steps” when creating new products. He also said the company’s projects are now proceeding at a faster rate, and that it has changed the way it negotiates with telecommunications partners.

The deal has even pushed HTC to change its sales and marketing strategies for the year ahead.

It was reported that HTC would pay Apple between $6 and $8 for every device it sold. When you consider how much HTC’s devices sell for, that’s a relatively small price to pay, but it would have turned into an additional $280 million in revenue for Apple during 2013. However, HTC CEO Peter Chao recently dismissed those reports as “outrageous.”